In his paper “Personalism, Community and the Origins of Human Rights,” Samuel Moyn argues that a relatively understudied current of Catholic political thought—known as personalism—played a key role in the affirmation of human rights as today’s dominant ideological framework. This may initially appear surprising given the well-known opposition of traditional Catholic social doctrine to the values normally associated with liberalism, modernity and the French Revolution. However, Moyn’s argument is that Catholic political thought underwent a transformation in the middle part of the twentieth century, developing a distinctive doctrine of human rights on the basis of a concept of the human “person,” which turned out to be crucial for the inscription of human rights within the juridical and political framework of the post-war order. Indeed, Moyn argues that this Catholic rediscovery of human rights took place at a time (the early 1940s) during which other, more progressive, intellectual and political currents were relatively uninterested in them. Thus, he provocatively suggests that the widespread prestige this notion enjoys today has its roots in an essentially “conservative” political project of the mid-twentieth century.
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On the recognition of human rights
by Nicholas WolterstorffSamuel Moyn's essay, "Personalism, Community, and the Origins of Human Rights," makes an important contribution to our understanding of the history of the concept of human rights. I am a philosopher. Though I have a considerable interest in history, I am not a historian. Before reading Moyn's essay I knew nothing about the developments that he discusses. Discovering the depths of my ignorance might have left me feeling embarrassed and chagrined but for the fact that, as Moyn observes, almost none of his fellow active historians knew anything about these developments either.
All churches have heretics: On Catholicism, human rights, and the advantages of history for life
by James ChappelIn the years since Samuel Moyn’s essay on Jacques Maritain, personalism, and human rights appeared, he has overseen a transformation in the field of human rights history. As he put it in The Last Utopia, he sought to overcome what he calls the “Church history” of human rights, referring to those stories that view human rights “as a saving truth, discovered rather than made in history.” These stories, in Moyn’s view, parallel the uncritical view that Church historians once took of the Catholic Church, and they keep us from analyzing human rights from a critical, Nietzschean perspective. One irony of the project is that Moyn, like Friedrich Nietzsche before him, returns to Church history in a new key. The Catholic and Protestant churches are integral to his revisionist account of human rights consciousness, which, it turns out, has more to do with Christian anti-Communism and post-fascist conservatism than it does with the noble, secularist legacy of 1789.
Not Church history?
by Dan EdelsteinWhen Samuel Moyn talks about Church history, it is usually not meant as a compliment. He has shaken up the field of human rights history with his pointed criticisms of the historiographical fallacies to which many of its practitioners fall prey. The worst offenders are precisely Church historians, either in a figurative (like Jonathan Israel) or literal sense, those who succumb to “the general flaws of teleology, tunnel vision, and triumphalism.” Now, with his new book Christian Human Rights, Moyn delves straight into the heart of historiographical darkness itself, challenging the pieties of Christian (as well as some leftist) evangelists. The results are very impressive: Moyn writes intellectual history on a global scale, complete with archival finds and a subtle grasp of theological concepts.
Christian human rights—An introduction
by Samuel Moyn
Christmas Day, 1942. The outcome of World War II was undecided, but the pope had something new to say. A month before, the tide at Stalingrad had turned against the Germans. Just two days before, General Erich von Manstein had abandoned his efforts to relieve the Wehrmacht’s doomed Sixth Army. But there was no telling that the extraordinary German strength in the war so far would now ebb quickly. The Americans had formally entered the war a year before, but the Allies would not reach mainland Italy for another nine months, or make it to Rome for a year and a half. The pope—Eugenio Pacelli, or Pius XII—was in dire straits. His relationship with Benito Mussolini had long since soured, and he was a prisoner in his own tiny Roman domain. As for the Jews, the worst victims of the conflict, millions were dead already; the victims at Babi Yar had lain in their ravine for more than a year; Treblinka, the most infernal death camp, had come on line six months before and already completed much of its grim work. Officially, of course, the Catholic Church and its leader were neutral, and didn’t play politics. Many of his flock were to be found on both sides of the war.
5 questions (and answers) about religious exemptions for vaccines
by Wei ZhuThe measles outbreak originating in Disneyland in California—which was finally declared over last month after 169 cases in the U.S.—thrust the issue of non-medical vaccination exemptions into the political spotlight again, and fueled the growing public controversy over their place in mandatory immunization policies. Personal exemptions for moral or philosophical reasons exist in some states, but religious exemptions, which are allowed in forty-eight states, are far more prevalent. Determined to cut down on the number of unvaccinated people, lawmakers across the U.S. have proposed restrictions and bans on religious exemptions, triggering heated (and ongoing) debates in California, Maine, and Vermont. The current backlash raises a series of important legal, political, and religious questions about these exemptions, beginning with the most basic one.